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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Grabango

SKS 2020: Grabango Says its Computer Vision Avoids Biases Because it Doesn’t Use Facial Recognition

Grabango CEO Will Glaser said this week that because his company’s technology doesn’t use facial recognition, it can avoid some of the same types of racial biases found in other computer vision and machine learning algorithms. Glaser’s comments came during my fireside chat with him at our Smart Kitchen Summit this week.

Grabango makes cashierless (or as Grabango calls it, “lineless”) checkout technology for grocery retail. Grabango installs hundreds of cameras in the ceiling of a store, and through a combination of computer vision and AI, keeps track of what people put in their basket (or pocket). When shoppers go to check out, they choose a cashier or use an accompanying mobile app that automatically charges for the items kept.

This type of computer vision-based system is also used by other cashierless checkout companies such as Zippin, Standard Cognition and Amazon, and could become more widespread as demand for contactless retail experiences grows.

But the problem with some computer vision + AI systems is that their algorithms can contain the human biases of their creators. As TechCrunch wrote earlier this year, “MIT researchers reported in January 2019 that facial recognition software is less accurate in identifying humans with darker pigmentation.” In a busy retail environment where a lot of people are grabbing a lot of different items all throughout the day, it’s not hard to see how this type of bias could adversely impact people of color.

Glaser recognized some of the problems that can arise when algorithms are only developed or trained on white men in a lab. He made a point of saying that Grabango’s technology does not use facial recognition, and that it has a 99.6 percent revenue accuracy rate. Grabango’s system does follow a person around store, but doesn’t personally identify them (it can, however, stay with a person even after they have put on or taken off a jacket).

Grabango’s system is also being used in real world conditions, so it continues to train its algorithms in a diverse setting. Last month, Grabango announced that it’s integration with Giant Eagle’s GetGo Market in the Pittsburgh area went live. So now we’ll be able to see in a more open environment if Glaser’s claims hold true.

The Food Tech Show: Walmart+ and Ghost Kitchen Robots

It may be the waning days of summer, but there’s still time to get outside for a walk and listen to podcasts and the Spoon team is here to help with our latest episode of The Food Tech Show.

This week, the team discusses the launch of the strategy behind Walmart+, Walmart’s long-rumored membership program centered around grocery and food which will now launch on September 15th.

Other stories discussed on the podcast include:

You can subscribe to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or wherever you listen. If you’re a regular listener, we’d really appreciate a review!

You can also listen by clicking play below or downloading direct to your device.

Giant Eagle Launches Cashierless Checkout Using Grabango’s Tech

Grabango announced today that its cashierless checkout technology is now publicly launched at grocery retailer Giant Eagle’s GetGo Cafe+Market. This is the first commercial launch for Grabango’s technology.

Giant Eagle announced its partnership with Grabango last July, though we didn’t know at that time how the technology would be implemented. The first location to use Grabango will be the GetGo Café+Market in Fox Chapel, which serves the Pittsburgh, PA area. At just 3,000 sq. ft, the GetGo space is smaller than a full-sized grocery store, which is an important detail since the cashierless checkout concept still faces questions around scalability and affordability.

To use the new cashierless checkout, GetGo customers will need to download the Grabango app for iOS or Android and connect it to a payment system (like a credit card). Once all that’s done, customers just enter the store like normal — there’s no check in or special turnstile to scan the phone. Shoppers grab what they want and cameras throughout the store keep track of what is picked up and put back (the system does not use facial recognition). When customers are done, the app generates a special code that is scanned on the way out which automatically applies the charges and sends a receipt.

Grabango is the latest cashierless checkout company to announce a public installation. Last week Mastercard announced a partnership with Accel Robotics for a cashierless checkout solution that will be used at Circle K and Dunkin stores. Zippin recently transformed part of a Azbuka Vkusa grocery store in Moscow into a cashierless experience. And earlier this year Amazon, which pioneered cashierless checkout, opened up its Go Grocery store in Seattle, which features the grab-and-go technology.

With the pandemic still in effect throughout the world, we will likely see more announcements like these in the coming months. Grocery stores have already put measures like plexiglass shields and pay terminal sterilizing in place to help protect customers and cashiers from the virus. Removing the human-to-human checkout process altogether is a natural extension of those protections. With the influx of grocery e-commerce those cashiers could be kept at work picking e-commerce orders and doing customer service.

In today’s press announcement, which was emailed to The Spoon, Grabango said that it has been deploying its checkout systems to “the world’s largest grocery and convenience store chains since early 2019,” so this is definitely not the last we’ve heard from them.

Giant Eagle Announces Partnership with Grabango for Checkout-Free Shopping

Sometimes an announcement of news is as important as the news itself. This is the case with the announcement today that grocery retailer Giant Eagle has partnered with Grabango and will implement the latter’s checkout-free shopping at its stores.

There weren’t a lot of details outside of the press release, so we don’t know where the technology has been installed or when consumers will actually be able to use it. But Grabango CEO Will Glaser told me by phone, “This is not a proof of concept. This is to show that the technology has already been through proof of concept and works with [Giant Eagle’s] operations.”

And this is where the announcement of the news is equally as important as the news itself. Grabango (gruh-BANG-go) is among a host of startups looking to retrofit existing grocery stores with checkout-free shopping experiences — that is, where shoppers walk into a store, pick out what they want and leave, getting charged automatically on their way out.

Grabango, which raised $12 million in January, uses a combination of lots of small cameras mounted on a store’s ceiling along with computer vision and AI to keep track of what a person is taking. The company also integrates with a store’s existing checkout systems so a shopper could either walk out and pay via app or just pay the total to a traditional cashier on their way out with a credit card or cash.

Companies like Standard Cognition, Caper, Zippin and Trigo Vision are all in various states of pilot testing their particular cashierless checkout solutions with different retailers.

But so far only Grabango and Trigo Vision have named the retailers they are working with publicly. Grabango’s news follows Trigo Vision’s announcement last November that it would partner with Israeli supermarket chain Shufersal (and is rumored to be working with Tesco). The fact that these two retailers are now on the record with these partnerships highlights their confidence in those technologies and signals they are one step closer to actual and broader implementation.

As Albertsons VP of eCommerce, Trung Nguyen, said at Articulate, our food automation conference, grocers want technology solutions that already show they can work at scale. And big grocery chains are looking to implement this type of cashierless checkout innovation as Amazon continues to roll out its cashierless Go stores, and Walmart launched its fast lane checkout and high-tech IRL store, which features lots of cameras and computer vision for inventory management.

There are a lot of grocery stores around the world, so there probably won’t be a winner-take-all scenario for one cashierless checkout company. But Giant Eagle coming out and saying that it is partnering with Grabango and that its solution is ready for prime time is a big, well, Giant Eagle feather in Grabango’s cap.

Here is a List of Cashierless Tech Companies Gunning for Amazon Go

Bloomberg has a story up today about the Portugal-based startup, Sensei, titled “Amazon Go Faces Unlikely Challenge From Checkout-Free Startup.” The headline caught my eye because it isn’t unlikely at all, in fact, it’s quite likely. While Amazon has a substantial headstart in getting cashierless stores to market (10 and counting), Bezos’ behemoth faces all kinds of technological challenges from companies big and small in the checkout-free space.

As a quick refresher, cashierless checkout stores are retail environments that allow the shopper to walk in, grab what they want and leave without standing in a checkout line. Some combination of high-tech sensors and cameras keep track of what you buy and charge you automatically. Different companies have different approaches, some of them more advanced than others, but here’s who’s out there right now:

Caper: Rather than installing cameras and sensors in the store, Caper shifts that technology to its smart shopping carts, so retailers don’t have to spend a lot of money to retrofit their locations. Current versions of the cart require the user to scan items, but they’ve said computer vision is coming to make recording what you put in your cart automatic. Caper has raised $3 million raised and says it is in use by two major unnamed grocery store chains.

DeepMagic: Rather than scaling up, DeepMind scales down to create unattended kiosk shopping experiences that are meant to live inside existing locations (think: Hotel or office lobbies). Even these mini, mini shopping stores will face off against Amazon, as the company is reportedly looking to shrink Go stores to fit inside offices to feed hungry workers. DeepMagic is self-funded and has been used by Cisco to sell swag at one of its conferences.

Grabango: A relative newcomer to the cashierless space, Granbango came out of stealth earlier this year. It uses lots of tiny smartphone camera-sized cameras mounted on the ceiling to saturate its computer vision field and keep track of purchases. Grabango’s hook is that it integrates with the store checkout system, so when shoppers are done, they can still pay with a credit card or cash without a cashier scanning each item. Grabango has raised $17.3 million and says it is in pilots with three major grocers and one convenience store chain.

Microsoft: Microsoft isn’t one to let a cross-town rival like Amazon dominate a market without putting up a fight. But right now we’ve only heard reports of the Redmond giant working on cashierless tech with Walmart (another Amazon rival). Another clue that Microsoft cashierless tech could be forthcoming is its recent partnership with Kroger to pilot a new type of tech-forward, smart stores.

Sam’s Club: The Walmart-owned Sam’s Club opened up an experimental store last year, which requires the use of Walmart’s Scan & Go app to pay for items.

Skip: Similar to Sam’s Club approach, Skip is another small entrant in the cashierless space that is targeting convenience stores. Shoppers download and use the Skip app to scan and purchase items in the store. Skip is currently iN use in several western convenience store chains and has raised $5 million in seed funding.

Standard Cognition: While Standard Cognition has its own working store in San Francisco, it’s mainly there to showcase its cashierless chops. Standard Cognition’s website makes a big deal about it not using facial recognition and being built around privacy. The company has raised $51 million in funding and says it has agreements with four retailers across Asia, North America and Europe.

Trigo Vision: Israel-based Trigo Vision retrofits existing stores with off-the-shelf cameras and computer vision to create its cashierless experience. The company has raised $7 million, is in a pilot with an unnamed European retailer and last November signed a deal with Israel’s Shufersal to implement checkout free shopping across all of that chain’s 272 locations.

V7 (formerly AI Poly): We haven’t covered this company fully here at The Spoon yet. AI Poly recently rebranded its retail efforts as V7, and now uses AI Poly for vision AI for the visually impaired and blind. The V7 website says its AI system can plug into and work with existing security cameras, depending on the number a store operates.

7-11: The convenience store chain’s tech works more like a self-checkout than true grab-and-go retail. In the pilot store the company launched towards the end of last year, shoppers use the 7-11 app to scan items and then manually pay for them at separate checkout stations.

And now we can add Sensei to this list. Are there any others we’re leaving out? Any stealthy ones you want to spill the beans on? If so, drop us a line and let us know!

Grabango Raises $12M for its Scalable Cashierless Tech

It was just about a year ago when Amazon opened its first cashierless Amazon Go store in Seattle. Throughout 2018, others were quick to follow as players like Microsoft, Standard Cognition, Sam’s Club, Deep Mind, AI Poly, 7-11 and Trigo Vision all started developing and rolling out their own versions of cashierless checkout retail experiences.

All this is to say that while the cashierless checkout space is pretty crowded, another entrant, Grabango (pronounced GraBANGo), yesterday announced it had raised a $12 million Series A round to roll out its take on cashierless tech. The round was led by Propel Ventures, and brings Grabango’s total amount raised to $18 million.

Like Standard Cognition and Trigo Vision, Grabango builds cashierless systems for third parties — retailers that want to implement such systems without building them in-house. I spoke with Grabango CEO, Will Glaser, who said that his company’s technology differs from the competition in a few ways.

First, it uses small, smartphone-like cameras and sensors. Mounted to the ceiling, these vision systems are not so high-def that they can read barcodes, but are, according to Glaser, the equivalent of a person looking across a room. They can tell the difference between a can of Coke and a can of Diet Coke. There are a lot of these cameras installed, so much so, that every item on a shelf has 200 percent coverage. If one fails, there’s another watching.

Glaser said the algorithms powering their AI and computer vision TECH are smart enough to detect and work through elemental changes such as lighting conditions, as well as branding changes (like when Coke releases its holiday packaging) in real time.

Glaser also says that Grabango’s system already works at scale. It can be retrofitted into an existing retailer as large as 100,000 square feet of space with hundreds of simultaneous shoppers.

Finally, Grabango handles checkout in two different ways. If you download and install the Grabango app you can literally “grab-n-go,” placing all your items in a bag and walking out. The mobile app will then charge you accordingly. Or, you can also gather all your items and go to a checkout stand and pay however you want with cash, credit, Apple Pay, etc. (even with SNAP benefits). The system knows when you — and all the stuff you’re buying — are at the checkout stand, provides the total so all you have to do is pay the cashier.

It may seem counterintuitive for a cashierless checkout company to offer a checkout option, but Glaser said that Grabango’s system eliminates the most time-consuming part of the checkout process — taking items out of your cart and manually scanning them — so you can just pay.

According to him, the company is already in pilots with three major grocers and one convenience store chain in the U.S., though he wouldn’t provide any further details. Grabango is a SaaS business and charges retailers a monthly subscription fee.

One aspect of Grabango’s technology that the company isn’t as focused on right now is the real-time information it can provide to retailers. Who needs a shelf-scanning robot slowly going up and down aisles, when the ceiling mounted cameras can tell in real time what items are low? There also seem to be opportunities for real-time mapping of stores to make online order fulfillment by human workers faster and more efficient.

Between Amazon Go’s aggressive rollout and the number of startups working on the issue, cashierless tech in the real world is poised to accelerate this year.